Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep Peter DeFazio (D-OR) proposed a rule Monday that would end price gouging on prescription drugs and other health care products developed with taxpayer money. Sanders and DeFazio reintroduced their bill, which they first proposed two decades ago with bipartisan support, after drugmaker Sanofi Pasteur refused to agree to fair pricing on a Zika virus vaccine developed with over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars.

The US Army is offering French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi an exclusive license to develop and market a vaccine for the Zika virus. American taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion on Zika research and prevention efforts, including millions to develop a vaccine. The Department of Health and Human Services gave Sanofi $43 million to develop the vaccine with $130 million in federal funding still to come.

But Sanofi has refused to agree to sell the drug back to Americans at a fair price. Without a fair pricing agreement, the company can charge Americans whatever astronomical price it wants for its vaccine.

“Americans should not be forced to pay the highest prices in the world for a vaccine we spent more than $1 billion to help develop. Sanofi gets more than one-third of its roughly $34 billion in revenues from the United States alone, and its CEO made nearly $5 million in salary last year. Yet they have rejected the U.S. Army’s request for fair pricing. That is simply unacceptable,” Sanders said.

“Americans pay more out-of-pocket for prescription drugs than individuals in any other country, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and France.Additionally, billions of U.S. tax dollars are spent every year underwriting the development and distribution of prescription drugs and insulating private drug companies from direct competition,” said DeFazio. “Bizarrely, there is no adequate regulation on the pharmaceutical industry to ensure drug companies can’t reap massive profits on the taxpayer’s dime. Our legislation will ensure a more equal playing field and rein in the drug companies’ reckless greed.”

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Sanders’ bill faces dim prospects of becoming law. The deep-pocketed pharmaceutical industry has cultivated powerful allies in both parties, despite Democrats’ recently released platform taking aim at drug prices. In January, 13 Democrats joined 39 Republicans to vote down a bill designed to lower prescription drug prices. Among them was Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a rising star in the party with potential 2020 presidential ambitions, who said during an NPR interview last month that he put a “pause” on fundraising from drug companies because “it arouses so much criticism.”

The bill seems unlikely to find support in the White House, despite Trump’s campaign trail promises to crack down on drug pricing. Rather than pushing for legislation, the administration is weighing an executive order that would strengthen monopoly rights for pharmaceutical companies overseas, eliminate discounts for low-income hospitals and speed up drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration, Kaiser Health News reported in June. Bloomberg Gadfly’s health industry columnist described the order as being “more like a pharma wish list than a menu of onerous demands.”

Plus, no president since George H.W. Bush has intervened to lower prices on government-backed drugs.

Still, Sanders’ bill sets the stage for a larger debate over drug pricing, particularly because it targets federal agencies as well as nonprofits funded by federal grants. If such a law were in place, the government would have more power to regulate major new technologies like CRISPR, the gene-engineering technique that, according to reports this month, has been used to edit a human embryo.

“This is a really big deal,” Jamie Love, the director of KEI, told HuffPost on Monday morning. “This means that the public, who pays for the research and development of a number of drugs, vaccines and other medical technologies, will pay lower prices for inventions that they subsidized.”

Senator Bernie Sanders said recently that his current goal is showing the American working class that “their problems are not caused by some Mexican making eight dollars an hour picking strawberries.”

In an interview with New Yorker reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells published recently, Sanders said that he has encountered a lot of “despair” on his recent travels to rural parts of the US.

Over the last several months, the Vermont senator and one-time presidential candidate has been actively touring traditionally conservative states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, as well as swing states like Ohio, to talk about how the goals of the Democratic Party could help low-income, rural Americans.

“There is a lot of pain. And we’ve got to understand that reality,” Sanders said in the interview. “And then tell these people that their problems are not caused by some Mexican making eight dollars an hour picking strawberries.”

Even though Sanders identifies as Independent, he said he hopes to convince low-income people in rural communities that the values of the Democratic National Committee could help communities dealing with problems like the opioid epidemic and a lack of jobs that pay liveable wages.

Even though the Democratic Party apparently has moved toward the left following the election of President Donald Trump, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has a warning for progressives.

“Do not underestimate the resistance of the Democratic establishment,” Sanders told The New Yorker.

Sanders has returned to classifying as an Independent following his second-place finish in the 2016 Democratic primaries. While he came up short against Hillary Clinton, and his ally Keith Ellison lost the race to lead the Democratic National Committee, many credit Sanders for the Democratic Party’s leftward policy shift

Ideas Sanders has long promoted, such as a $15 minimum wage, a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure and a nationwide single-payer health care system, are gaining popularity in the party.

One reason Trump was elected was because he saw that the Democratic Party had ignored millions of voters, Sanders told The New Yorker.

“He said, ‘Hey, I hear you. I’m going to do something for you.’ And he lied,” Sanders said.

Freshman Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has recently become the subject of much speculation about a potential 2020 presidential run. Several major news outlets have run feature-length profiles of Harris, and top Democratic donors are starting to coalesce around her as their preferred candidate to take on President Donald Trump.

But not everyone on the progressive left is feeling Harris-fever, and if the senator wants to win the Democratic presidential primary in three years, she’ll have to start making inroads with a growing grassroots movement that remains highly skeptical of Harris’s progressive bona fides.

Nomiki Konst, a Bernie Sanders supporter who serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission had three words for Democrats interested in Harris as a candidate: “Follow the money.”

“The Democrats will not win until they address income inequality, no matter how they dress up their next candidate,” Konst said. “If that candidate is in bed with Wall Street, you may as well lay a tombstone out for the Democratic Party now. Voters are smart; they can follow the money.”

Konst’s skepticism about Harris’s alleged ties to Wall Street and insufficient commitment to populist economic issues reflect a broader trend among the residents of Bernieland. In a recent New York Times profile of Harris, another high profile Sanders supporter, executive director of National Nurses United RoseAnn DeMoro dismissed Harris’s prospects as a progressive 2020 contender, saying, “She’s not on our radar.”

NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his plans to push forward with a bill for a single-payer health insurance system, in the wake of Republican failures to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

In the face of “cruel” attempts by the Republican Party to strip health insurance from more than 30 million Americans with the goal of providing massive tax breaks to the wealthy, a new poll published on Thursday finds that a growing majority of the public is “shifting toward the political left” on healthcare and expressing support for a system that ensures coverage for all.

The poll, conducted by the Associated Press in partnership with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows that 62 percent of public believes it is “the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage.”

As AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Laurie Kellman note, this is a dramatic shift in popular attitudes over a very short period of time.

The most recent court hearing on the class action lawsuit filed against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on behalf of Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters occurred in late April 2017 when a federal court judge in South Florida heard arguments from DNC attorneys and Attorney Jared Beck for why the court should move forward on the case. That decision is still pending, but on July 27 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee wrote a seven page letter to the Department of Justice seeking a special counsel probe into several aspects of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“We call on you to appoint a second special counsel to investigate a plethora of matters connected to the 2016 election and its aftermath,” the Republicans wrote, citing actions made by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who controversially met with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac days before FBI Director James Comey gave a public statement on the FBI’s conclusion of their investigation. The committee members are seeking a special counsel similar to that of Robert Mueller, who was appointed to oversee the investigation into Trump’s connection with Russia.

Along with the letter, Republicans listed 14 requests for a special counsel to investigate “inappropriate collusion between the DNC and Clinton Campaign to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.”

A right-leaning ethics group is pushing for a congressional probe into Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz because she continued to employ an IT staffer for months after he became the focus of a criminal investigation.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a conservative accountability group, is requesting the Office of Congressional Ethics launch an investigation into what the nonprofit says is Wasserman Schultz’s “apparent breach” of House rules for continuing to employ Imran Awan, even after he was blocked from accessing the House IT system earlier this year.

South Louisiana is mostly swamp or bayou, so when Cherri Foytlin wanted to share her disapproval with the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, she literally didn’t have solid ground to stand on. Instead, she and other protest organizers built a floating prayer camp made of rafts.

“Historically, the swamp is where resistance has gathered,” she told me. “Escaped slaves, indigenous communities escaping colonization. The swamp protects us, so of course this is where our camp would be—with the water.”

The proposed pipeline she’s fighting would be a 162-mile extension of an existing pipeline in Texas. If approved, the Bayou Bridge Pipeline would pass through 11 Louisiana parishes. Foytlin, a Diné and Cherokee mother of six, has been a prominent leader in the struggle against it.

Camp L’eau Est La Vie, French for “water is life,” is constantly changing and growing, with new rafts or indigenous art pieces being added on. Foytlin tells me that she and other organizers are intentionally keeping many details about the camp secret—a lesson learned from watching Standing Rock, where outsiders flocked to the anti-pipeline camps after the battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) became a national cause.

Towards the end of March, President Donald Trump, surrounded by Republican lawmakers and TransCanada CEO Russ Girling, announced that his administration had decided to approve a key permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, effectively allowing the stalled project to begin moving forward once again.

“The bottom line: Keystone, finished,” Trump said at the time.

Reality, however, presents a very different picture than Trump’s rhetoric. Last week, TransCanada, the pipeline’s developer, announced that it was still trying to secure customers for the oil that would be carried by the pipeline. And the project still needs approval from a Nebraska regulatory commission, which likely won’t come until late November.

Taken together, those developments suggest that the pipeline — which activists, indigenous communities, and Midwestern landowners have spent nearly a decade fighting — might not be built after all.

Aging and dangerous nuclear power plants are closing. This should be cause for celebration. We will all be safer now, right? Well, not exactly.

US nuclear power plant owners are currently pouring resources into efforts to circumvent the already virtually non-existent regulations for the dismantlement and decommissioning of permanently closed nuclear reactors.

And sad to say, many on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the industry’s ever compliant lapdog, are trotting happily by their side.

The inevitable result is that reactor owners will successfully avoid spending money now on decommissioning as they seek to delay beginning the actual cleanup work for the next half century and maybe longer. Later, when it comes time to finish the job, the owners – and the money – could well be long gone.

As President Trump’s State Department took steps to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, the project’s owner, TransCanada, lobbied on two bills in Montana which will ease the company’s regulatory burden in the state.

Those bills, HB 365 and SB 109, moved along in the state’s legislature with no media coverage despite the state being the first crossed in the pipeline’s proposed journey from Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska. HB 365, which passed in May, will allow TransCanada to escape civil liability for any potential damages suffered by its contracted land surveyors. Meanwhile, SB 109 would have required environmental reviews for infrastructure projects in Montana to consider impacts beyond state lines, but failed to pass.

TransCanada spent $4,348 on its Montana lobbying efforts for the 2017 session, according to its post-session disclosure form, including $830 wining and dining the 10-member Montana American Indian Caucus. The slated 830,000 barrel-per-day oil pipeline would pass near the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and cross the Missouri River, a water source for 7,000 Assiniboine and Sioux tribe members.

The owners of the planned Atlantic Sunrise pipeline are buying the 107-acre farm in Conestoga Township that has served as a center for those opposed to the project.

Williams said in a statement to LNP that it was buying the Justin and Susan Cappiello farm on Conestoga Boulevard to allow for a large staging area so that it can drill under the Conestoga River.

Opponents of the pipeline that would go through 37 miles of Lancaster County are accusing Oklahoma-based Williams Partners of going out of its way to quash opposition.

Lancaster Against Pipelines said in a statement that the purchase was a “futile effort to squelch a locally vibrant and nationally recognized movement.

“The sale is a stark example of how much pressure — through unlimited resources, the complicity of regulatory agencies, high-power attorneys, local and federal legislators, and slick advertising — the corporation can bring to bear on private landowners.

Energy Transfer Partners L.P. (ETP.N) said on Monday it would sell a 32.44 percent stake in a firm associated with the Rover pipeline project to Blackstone funds for about $1.57 billion.

The 700-mile Rover pipeline, the biggest natural gas pipeline under construction in the United States, is designed to transport 3.25 billion cubic feet per day of domestically produced natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica Shale production areas to markets across the United States as well as Canada.

Construction of the $4.2-billion Rover pipeline has hit several roadblocks in recent weeks.

West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection told the company last week to stop some work, citing environmental violations.

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Ohio — Families are forced to move out of their houses after landslides in Toronto.

They were caused by complications coming as a result of Rover Pipeline drilling.

There is significant damage along Hale Road in Knox Township, just west of Toronto. Just days ago, a landslide pushed dirt and debris near houses at the bottom of the hill, forcing families to evacuate. According to township trustees, it’s a result of drilling near old underground mines.

Residents are fed up with the damage.

“I want them to make this road safe,” resident Jason Gorney said. “It’s not just this house. It’s affecting several houses up the road. It seems to be spreading further and further. I just want it to be safe out here.”

Two ranking Democrats in Congress have asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to further investigate the practices of pipeline builder Energy Transfer Partners, which has merged with Sunoco Logistics, after spills and permit violations occurred on two of its major projects in three different states, including the Mariner East 2 pipeline here in Pennsylvania.

In a letter to FERC last Thursday, Congressman Frank Pallone Jr., and Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell, detail recent spills in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and criticize the company for misleading regulators by destroying an historic home in Ohio. StateImpact reported recently on a judge ordering ETP/Sunoco to stop construction on a valve station in West Goshen Township, where the company began building a valve station at a location the township had not agreed to.

An analysis by Mountain Valley Pipeline of the controversial project’s impacts on intact forests in Virginia underestimated those effects by more than 300 percent, according to an assessment by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation and other state agencies.

South Carolina Electric & Gas Company (SCE&G) announced Monday that it will cease construction of the two new nuclear units at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station.

The decision to abandon the V.C. Summer project is of monumental proportion and is a full admission that pursuit of the project was a fool’s mission right from the start. The damage that this bungled project has caused to ratepayers and the state’s economy must be promptly addressed by SCE&G, Santee Cooper and regulators and all effort must be made to minimize that damage. SCE&G and Santee Cooper must now take on a large part of the project’s cost.

To reduce the on-going blow to SCE&G ratepayers already paying 18 percent of the bill just to pay for project financing, it’s time for money to be refunded as it was collected from them under the false pretense that advance payment for the nuclear project was sound. In proceedings before the South Carolina Public Service Commission, we pledge to be a steward of the public interest and to determine who must be held accountable for this boondoggle and to fight for monetary reparations to customers.

They have ongoing discussion about the captured government support of nuclear power and the problems with waste which has not been solved and what is happening in Japan after the melt down.

Remember when Obama was all for more nuclear plants? And his Nobel prize physic prof as head of dept of energy was also beating the drums for nuclear ….

Welcome to Nuclear Hotseat, the weekly international news magazine on all things anti-nuclear. Each week, we provide news, interviews, humor , commentary and perspective on all aspects of the nuclear issue. In continuous production since three months after the Fukushima disaster began in 2011, we are downloaded in 58 countries on six continents and have received as many as half a million downloads on a single episode. Feel free to search or browse our archive, click on links to back-up material and share what you find here with interested others.

An U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) history exhibit that opened just before President Donald Trump took office is expected to lose some of its Obama-era climate displays, which could be replaced with a presentation on coal to reflect the policies of the current administration.

As the Trump administration has rolled back environmental regulations, and controversial EPA chief Scott Pruitt has publicly defended the deregulation and spread doubt about climate science, EPA staff members who worked on the exhibit tipped off Trump officials that some of its content conflicts with the administration’s environmental policies, according to the Washington Post.

Health campaigners said the energy policies of the world’s richest countries are inflicting a double burden on their citizens, not only using their taxes to pay fossil fuel subsidies, but also loading huge health costs on them.

The work of the Health and Environment Alliance, HEAL, the report said that although fossil fuel combustion causes deadly air pollution and climate change, virtually all governments spend vast sums of public money—their citizens’ taxes—on supporting the oil, gas and coal industry in fossil fuel energy production.

A report by HEAL said the health costs associated with fossil fuels are more than six times higher than the subsidies the industry receives in the G20 group of the globe’s leading industrialized countries.

As President Donald Trump foments tensions with world powers by behaving recklessly and pursuing aggressive action over diplomacy, developments in several major nations over the weekend sparked urgent concerns among peace groups, activists, and analysts that the world’s largest militaries are inching dangerously close to war.

Watched MSNBC last night for a whole show. Lawrence O’Donald. He and others used the word “lie” from Trump. My wife who is a Hillary supporter and totally anti Trump watched it with me.

Most was on personality issues. Interesting comment that new Chief of Staff, John Kelly supported attacks on Muslims and illegals while head of Homeland Security. Some said that he was a straight shooter, but getting money for the military not the same as running a country.

Many think Maddow is a hero. I agree with items posted on this blog that show her a sellout to the dems — e.g., touting that Russia hacked the election.

Millennials and members of Generation X accounted for a larger number of votes in the 2016 elections than did Baby Boomers and older generations, marking a generational shift that is likely to influence the way both Democrats and Republicans approach a changing electorate.

A new report by Richard Fry, a labor economist at the Pew Research Center, found that those under the age of 51 — Generation X and Millennials — accounted for just shy of 70 million votes in 2016. Baby Boomers and members of the Silent and Greatest Generations accounted for just under 68 million votes.

Baby Boomers still account for the single greatest share of the electorate. The 48.1 million votes boomers cast in 2016 represented about 35 percent of the electorate.

But the inevitable aging process is conspiring against older generations: The Silent and Greatest Generations are experiencing precipitous decline in vote share as members grow older and die. The number of Baby Boomer voters peaked at 50.1 million in the 2004 election; the fast-growing Millennial generation still has room to expand.

Donald Trump personally dictated the press statement issued in the name of his eldest son Donald Jr that misleadingly downplayed the significance of a 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer, a new report alleged on Monday night.

According to the Washington Post, Trump personally intervened to prevent senior White House advisers from issuing a full and truthful account of the meeting on 9 June 2016 in which Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort came face-to-face with four Russians. One of the Russian visitors was the well-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The report, based on multiple though largely anonymous sources that included the president’s own advisers, has the potential to cause political, and even legal, trouble for the White House because it draws Trump himself much closer into the fray over the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a lightning rod in the Russian affair.

The global meat industry, already implicated in driving global warming and deforestation, has now been blamed for fueling what is expected to be the worst “dead zone” on record in the Gulf of Mexico.

Toxins from manure and fertiliser pouring into waterways are exacerbating huge, harmful algal blooms that create oxygen-deprived stretches of the gulf, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, according to a new report by Mighty, an environmental group chaired by former congressman Henry Waxman.

It is expected that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will this week announce the largest ever recorded dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It is expected to be larger than the nearly 8,200 square-mile area that was forecast for July – an expanse of water roughly the size of New Jersey.

A few years ago I was all out pushing my friend’s book “Worse Than You Think” by Keith Quincy. A philosopher, classic scholar, classical economist, and head of the government department at Eastern Washington Univ for 20 years spent almost 6 years on this book. It is available on amazon.com for 99 cents.

Among the things I learned was at that time, a few years ago, 20% of America was owned by foreigners.

Also I learned from that book that the US is the first empire in history that grew by giving away its markets.

I have been raising h#ll over this one for decades!! The original ‘dead zone” was already recorded and alerts put out over 25+ years ago. It was the sewer drain for the Mississippi River. You can look it up and see it. Dead Zone.T and R to the usual suspects!! 🙂

Days before a potentially historic union vote at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, the car company has been accused of running one of the “nastiest anti-union campaigns in the modern history of the American labour movement”.

The vote, planned for Thursday and Friday this week, comes as US unions are hopeful they can overturn a series of defeats as they seek to build membership in southern states, where manufacturers have moved to take advantage of lower wages and non-union workforces.

In the closing days of the campaign, which has attracted support from the former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, United Auto Workers (UAW) have become increasingly confident of victory even as managers have pressured workers to vote no. “People are rallying,” says Frank Figgers, co-chair of the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan.

Will never forget the Netroot Nations conference in San Jose shortly after Edward Snowden gave out the documents and when asked on a panel session about what to do with him, she said he should come home and fact the music.

A huge outcry from the crowd. A couple of people ejected. Made international news. Outside the meeting hall, the man man ejected said that if they can read, then they can write to devices. Hence the entire electrical infrastructure of the US is at risk. First time I heard this. Take over power grid. Phone grid. etc.

The Canadian government is investigating reports that Saudi Arabia is using armoured vehicles made in Canada against its own civilians – allegations that have prompted renewed scrutiny over Ottawa’s recent decision to sign off on a billion-dollar arms deal with the kingdom.

Videos and photos posted on social media in recent days allegedly show Riyadh using Canadian equipment in a violent crackdown on minority Shia dissidents in eastern Saudi Arabia. Last week at least five people were killed as security forces flushed out suspected militants in the town of Awamiya.

Members of four Colombian First Nations occupied a mine called La Cantera La Peña de Horeb, in the northern Cesar department, to protest against its illegal operations.

The protesters’ allegations were confirmed by the department’s environmental authority, whose representatives said they were going to press charges against Explominerales de la Costa S.A. for unrightfully extracting sand and gravel in the area.

Although satisfied with the decision, the Indigenous groups also demanded urgent action against other 160 mines whose activities -they say- are contaminating rivers, ravines and the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, the country’s largest swampy marsh.

Starting at the headwaters in Three Forks, Montana, the women will walk over the next month and a half to the river’s confluence with the Mississippi in Missouri. They are inviting the public to join them along the way for as long as they want.

Lori Watso of the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota will be walking the river. She says she is honoring the water as a giver of life.

“It’s our purpose, our intention to show our respect for the water and our gratitude and help other people to understand the importance of our caring for the water and its necessity in our future and future generations,” she explains.

They will be passing through the homelands of Native Americans along the way, including the Standing Rock reservation.

The national party remains far from consensus on a unified message — Democrats can’t even agree on whether the party needs one.

“Just as there isn’t one kind of Democrat, there are not just one kind of message that works,” said California Rep. Jim Costa, a Blue Dog Coalition co-chair. “One size doesn’t fit all. We have an economically diverse country.”

When the party’s congressional leaders gathered in suburban Virginia to roll out the new affirmative economic message they’d long been promising, it was designed to give Democrats a way to talk about what exactly they stand for — other than simply standing as the party of opposition to the White House.

But not every incumbent wants to be associated with the party’s message. And many of the party’s influential constituent groups and moneyed organizations are busy pursuing their own messaging and branding initiatives, and remain in the early stages of their own investigations into what went wrong in November. Some — including the Democratic National Committee and individual state party committees — are busy preparing their own, independent lines of messaging